Skepticism

EVENTS

No! Not the manosphere! I can’t take it!

Like many of us, I read ManBoobz regularly — it gives us a window into the weirdly repugnant world of the manosphere. But I assumed it was a snapshot of the worst of the manosphere…and to my horror, I have just realized that it was a representative snapshot. I now have this discombobulated picture of David Futrelle: he’s like a guy mining for turds under an outhouse. You simultaneously think, “OMG, that’s the easiest mission in the world” and “OMG, that’s the most horrible mission in the world.”

I was led to this insight by Vox Day, of all people. Yesterday’s foray into his hateful mindset led me to an awful discussion of a chart, and then…well, let’s just say I went spelunking beneath an outhouse, started climbing upwards, and suddenly found myself in the colon of the manosphere. I need a shower, badly.

Here’s the odious graph. All my scientific training is shrieking in outrage at this thing.

It comes from a site called The Rational Male — yes, the second word does not belong there. Here’s what the author says about it:

All that said, I can’t help but recognize the nerve that my SMV chart has struck throughout the internet. I’m not just talking about the manosphere proper here; from recognized psychology sites (generally for comparison) to BodyBuilding.com, this chart is easily the most linked-to picture from Rational Male. Whether it’s about refuting its accuracy or comparing how my instinctual understanding of SMP valuations gel with more scientific studies, that graph has become a benchmark, or at least the starting point, for a better understanding of comparative SMV over the course of a subjective lifetime.

Oh, jebus. The “struck a nerve” trope that every idiot who says something stupid on the internet trots out…

SMV? What’s that, you’re wondering.

It stands for “Sexual Market Value”. It purports to show the worth of men and women over a range of ages. Hold off on your rage for just a moment, and let’s look at it objectively.

First, the SMV axis. What are the units? There aren’t any. Why? Because he doesn’t actually measure anything. Get that? All of the values in this chart are arbitrary inventions that he totally made up. The entire thing is a fiction.

Second, the whole concept of “Sexual Market Value”. What does that even mean? It’s dimensionless. He doesn’t have a way to look at any person and say, “Your market value is X”. It doesn’t even make sense to put this into a chart; my sexual appeal to my wife is huge, but negligible to everyone else. Scarlett Johansen may have a reputation as a very sexy woman, but her sexual “market value” to me is zero, and not only is it offensive to propose that her sex is purchasable for some imaginary sum of a million quatloos or whatever, it probably isn’t even a real commodity.

Except, and here’s the scientifically repugnant part, he has no way to assess the SMV of an individual, except to look them up on the chart. Which he made up. The circularity is so perfect, it’s practically Biblical.

And then in his post he chastises critics for their inferior understanding of statistics, and unironically titles his post “Sex, Lies and Statistics”. Gaaaaah.

Let’s not even start on the ethics of judging people’s worth by the sole parameter of their sexual attractiveness. By that criterion, the author of that graph is a negative ten, and should be shoved in the hole beneath the outhouse and ignored for the rest of his days.

One last tip: don’t read the comments. Don’t read the comments. Don’t read the comments. In between totting up the scores on all the women they’ve had sex with, they’re laughing at the critics for not appreciating the science of the graph.

Hey, Dave Futrelle! I’m gonna let you handle this gig from here on out. I don’t think I have the stamina to handle it.

I just noticed that according to the graph, my wife’s SMV is just about zero, while mine is around 2. I’ve never been as high as a 2 in my life, and comparing the two of us, I know which of us is objectively far more attractive.

Do you notice how the Women part of the graph starts at a rather high value at age 15, implying that there is actually more of the graph in that direction? There’s a strong implication of 10 and 12 year olds being factored in here.

Not only the use of a totally arbitrary scale where the units are not explained at all, but also the fact that the distribution seems to be fairly logarithmic except for a weird bend at around the age of 21. Normally if you actually took measurements and then made a graph and you would find something like that, the first thing you do is to try to find a reason, because there better be a damn good one for such a strange outcome, and most of the time it would be a serious error.

Also, notice the X-axis starts at age 15, at which point the SMV of men is zero, but the SMV of women is not. Project the “women” curve back, and it looks he thinks their SMV starts rising at about age 10.

I’m also going to go out on a limb and guess that this guy is 38 years old.

What is creepy is that it implies that a 15 year old is almost twice as sexy as a 35 year old. And even creepier is that these graph appears to indicate that a 13 year old would be as sexy as a 31 year old. That graph would appear to cross the x axis at around 8 or 9. (If the shape is the same as the male curve, in a two-month old fetus still has sex market value greater than a 45 year old woman.)

As with Dunc, I’m guessing this guy is late 30s, early 40s. And I’m also guessing he’s never actually asked any women – or gay men for that matter – what ages they think men are most physically attractive.

I hadn’t known much about Vox Day, except that he was a pretty repugnant person. I looked to see if he had a Wikipedia article: he does, under his real name Theodore Beale. From there, I found this gem: apparently, Beale is a science fiction writer, was a member of the Science Fiction Writers Association. Was: he was expelled this last August after using a SFWA Twitter feed to link back to his blog (itself an apparently questionable action), specifically to a post containing several inflammatory remarks, focusing mainly on a woman of African ancestry.

I am now convinced that “pretty repugnant person” is far too generous. If he is representative of the manosphere, then may the FSM and the IPU have mercy on us all.

I’ve only occasionally glanced at Manboobz so only have a passing familiarity with it, but I am guessing the idea is that the MRA’s (or at least the ones who produced the chart) are personally attracted to women of about the age around the female peak in that chart, so they have the brilliant idea of convincing every woman around that age that their ‘value’ is about to drop, so they’d better start sleeping with a lot of men *now*, while they have the chance, and hope that at least some of them will pick the MRA’s in question?
i.e., an attempt to influence an entire generation of females primarily for their own personal pleasure..

It’s almost like this dipshit creep is trying to excuse the fact that he’s a middle aged man that wants to fuck underage girls by pulling a graph out his ass.
Wait, did I say “almost”? I meant “exactly”.

You notice how this guy is trying to sound all scientific–just like the fundies or the climate denialists. They’ve noticed all the smart kids have graphs and numbers. They felt left out, so they just pulled them out of alternative orifices.

If imitation is the highest form of flattery, then as a scientist, I ought to feel flattered. Why do I instead feel like curling up in the fetal position in a bath full of bleach?

What do you mean by SMV has no units? It is in USD and no human is ever worth more than $10. I was about to say that the graph is obtained by letting the hand push the mouse wheresoever it wants to go in MS Paint, but @Jacob Schmidt above is stated it much more elegantly.

The ‘graph-imitation’ has no scientific merit, and it has – at most – only a perverted ‘practical value’. Consequently the only remaining valuation for it is artistic…..but my cat regularly creates better art in her litterbox. (Admittedly I have a very artistic and cool cat, but still….)

The whole “market” thing sticks out to me. The message that comes across seems to deny the very possibility of niche markets and assumes that the lowest common denominator mass market is all there is. In reality, it’s mostly about finding a compatible partner who likes what you have and has what you like. It doesn’t matter what the rest of the market is like because you’re not dating the entire planet. We have matchmaking services because there’s a lot of people with niche desires wanting connections to people with similar desires.

Metaphor: There’s someone who loves to cook their own unique variation of a dish and wants to share it with someone who cooks an appropriate side dish so they can enjoy dinner together.* The people who created this chart come across as if they’re suggesting the cook should learn to prepare Big Macs exactly the way McDonalds does, because they’ll make more money that way. Meanwhile, they suggest those of the opposite sex learn to cook McDonalds fries exactly the way McDonalds does. They don’t seem to understand that money isn’t the goal, it’s about sharing something unique and personal.

The only way the message makes sense to me is if it was coming from a brothel’s marketing department, advocating for mass appeal over specialization for greater profit. Naturally, the lack of units undermines the argument. On that note, putting 15 year olds on the chart looks even more creepy.

—

*Please focus on the intended message that they’re two good things that are better when combined and disregard any implication of main dish/side dish hierarchy. Or any implied disparagement of main dish/main dish or side dish/side dish combinations or any kind of food which does not identify with “traditional” culinary roles. ;)

I am guessing the idea is that the MRA’s (or at least the ones who produced the chart) are personally attracted to women of about the age around the female peak in that chart, so they have the brilliant idea of convincing every woman around that age that their ‘value’ is about to drop, so they’d better start sleeping with a lot of men *now*, while they have the chance, and hope that at least some of them will pick the MRA’s in question?
i.e., an attempt to influence an entire generation of females primarily for their own personal pleasure..

Maybe, but I don’t know that even MRAs delude themselves into thinking that many 20-year-old women read their blogs. I think it’s more about reassuring themselves and each other that their “value” is still high or continuing to rise.

Of course, if they are trying to convince young women of the “truth” of their assertions, then it’s pretty much self-refuting, isn’t it? If young women need to be told that older men have “high sexual marketplace value,” then by definition, they don’t!

As much as I despise Vox Day and such ilk, and as much I hate to come even close to “supporting” something that comes out of that cesspool…I do have a few things to say.

First, my perspective: I’m reading this chart is Just A Dude. I’m a 25-year-old finishing his sixth year of a 2-year degree. I went to a pretty good highschool and am more “learned” than most of my “peers” but I’m still pretty solidly a layperson. I’m also mildly autistic; I’ve attempted to understand relationships through observation (of my peers, obviously; I don’t really have any academic sorts to hang out with) as best as I am able, but my understanding is lacking, I know. I don’t regularly read Manboobz, I do regularly read the entries at fstdt.com, most of my understanding of the “voice for men culture” comes from there (enough that I figured out what “smv” was, anyway).

From my perspective, the chart is not meant to be a scientifically compiled statistic. It looks like it was put together by an Average Guy (almost certainly a guy) so I am treating it as such.

The lack of y-axis units is irrelevant. It doesn’t measure units, it makes relative comparisons. It doesn’t need units, and any units it did have would be meaningless.

I don’t know how “sexual market value” is defined by that culture, or if they even have a definition. I’m working on my own interpretation of it: basically, the average relative value of a given gender at a given age to “the population at large”. Obviously this is not meant to fit every single person, it is only an average representation (at least as I see it; given the kind of slime that generated it, I would not be surprised if they actually did mean that an 18 year old woman has an “smv” of 9; stupid and shallow as that is). What the chart is saying therefore is that a 100 year old man would, on average, be less sexually appealing than a 25 year old man. This does not mean that no one would find a 100 year old appealing, or that all 25 year olds are more appealing than all 100 year olds. While not scientific by any means it seems quite obvious to me that 100 year olds are less appealing to “the average person” than 25 year olds; is this an assertion that this crowd denies?

Scarlett Johanssen’s “smv” to you may be 0 but to the “population at large” it’s much higher. (For the record, enough money will buy just about anything that is tangible. You can’t buy love but I guarentee Brad Pitt will blow you for a billion quadrillion dollars).

I would not take the chart to be the end-all, be-all of a person’s sexual worth (again, can’t speak for those who made it up – perhaps age really is all that they care about). If you looked me up on it, I would be a 4, but my actual value is 0 or lower (I’m ugly, apparently, I’m pretty sure I utterly lack charisma and there’s likely a few other factors that people look for that are too deep for me to determine). I’m not certain where you’re seeing the circularism, unless you believe he actually constructed the chart out of measured data (eg sampling 1000 people of various age ranges and placing them on the chart that doesn’t exist). That would definitely be circular. I highly doubt that it was based on any actual data though, rather than a general sense accrued from living in society.

I haven’t read his post. I doubt I’d want to. I don’t like the feeling of stomach churning.

As for myself, the graph roughly corresponds to both my sense of how society works, and my observations of the people I know. Within a group, the age thing is equal and other factors rise in prominence, but the age factor becomes important outside of the group. One of my female friends, who is my age, has been extremely…displeased with another of our friends (also about our age) since she ran off to another state with a guy more than twice our age, to the point that she broke off ties and wanted to major in criminal justice. I’m not nearly as desirable as a male friend of mine who is the same age. Even so, I’ve been told I’m more desirable (by several friends) than that old guy (though still not at all desirable). I won’t say that the curves and peaks are EXACTLY where my observations would put them, but it does capture the general sense.

Anyway, apologies for the long rambling post to say essentially “eh, looks about right based on layperson experience”. And as far as I care the people who actually made it can jump in a river of battery acid.

The blue graph also clearly has a larger total area than the pink. So unless the pink graph really flattens out to the left of the visible portion (ew ew ew gross), he’s also saying that men have a lifetime sexual value higher than women. This seems to contradict the constant whine from these MRA assholes that women are the gatekeepers of sex, never want sex, withold sex, and hold all the sexual power.

The weird transition on the dude graph from linear to more weibull-ish at around age 21 also begs for some explanation. If you’re going to make up a graph like this out of thin air, and then call it “science”, at least put a thought into the shapes you’re drawing.

Oh, and the 1-10 axis is the UNIVERSALLY UNDERSTOOD AND TOTALLY OBJECTIVE 1-10 hotness rating that ALL PEOPLE use to rate EVERYONE THEY SEE. You know, like when you’re hanging out with some of your friends, and you spot an HB8 walking by with a HB7 and two HB6’s, and (obviously following the 3-second-rule) you go over to open the set, addressing them over your shoulder of course in order to DHV, and giving them a false time constraint before you deliver a few friendly negs.

How the fuck do we read this thing? Do all 15 year old girls have an SMV of five? Are all markets equal? Is it the same for 15 year old boys, 25 year old men, and 75 year old men? What’s the room for error, here The way the graph is set up, it looks like the peak of the graph is actually a rate of change, and the integral is what we’re really looking for.

That page seems to argue that a man’s SMV isn’t actually do to his sexual value, but for his economic value as well. In other words a man’s SMV is both a function of his sex appeal and his economic stability, which is why it peaks at 35-40 (still young enough to be fit; old enough to have a stable, lucrative career). Of course, a women’s only value is for sex, so she peaks at 20-25.

The lack of y-axis units is irrelevant. It doesn’t measure units, it makes relative comparisons. It doesn’t need units, and any units it did have would be meaningless.

Uhh… no. A comparison needs to have a definition, and no definition is presented here. For instance, the specific gravity (SG) of a substance is defined as the density of that substance divided by the density of pure water.* So the SG of water is 1, and the SG of silicates ranges from about 3.5-4.3 (silicates being denser than water). The reynold’s number is a similar (if more complex) comparison, used to identify types of flow.

The graph does none of this; it’s made up “just so” bullshit being used to justify the author’s biases.

Who is the person actually making this judgement? My view on what is sexy, what is hot, has changed. What I considered sexy in high school is completely different from what I consider sexy now at age 47. What Wife views as sexy (what she has related to me, anyway) has also changed over time. Who is this mythical man and mythical woman who are making this judgement? not only that, but where do members of the GLBTQ community tie into this? After all, a gay man has a completely different idea of what is the Sexual Market Value (which is a really sick concept) of a man or a woman than I do.

What the feck is that weird “Peak Span” ?
It seems to be the age interval between a women’s maximum “SMV” (whatever the feck that is) and a man’s maximum “SMV”. During that interval of time a women’s “SMV” is supposedly tending to decrease, and a man’s increase.
Or something.

For that matter, what the feck is the weird “Comparative SMV” ?
It seems to be the point, at about age 30, where the woman’s and man’s “SMV” are identical. Or crossing.
Or something.

Hey, this chart has the approval of one of the top scientists of all time – no lesser luminary than Aristotle himself!

“The appropriate age for marriage is around eighteen for girls and thirty-seven for men.”

Politics, VII, 1335.a27

The fact that Aristotle married his first wife when he was about 37, and his second when she was about 18, has nothing to do with this of course! Or that marriage was traditionally an arranged affair in fourth-century Athens, with teenage girls generally marrying older men as soon as they reached reproductive maturity. No personal or cultural bias here, just pure unadulterated science!

Though someone might want to notify these people that the science of social anthropology has moved on a little bit in the last 2400 years…

yeah, there’s nothing in principle wrong with dimensionless relative units, IF they are generated by normalizing actual data!
The lack of confidence intervals is also a major problem here…
oh what’s the point, the whole thing is SO stupid that I retreat to my initial reaction: *pukes*

rpjohnston
I think by “circularity” PZ means that this ‘Rational Male’ person had a pre-conceived notion, drew up a picture to represent that idea, then pointed to the graph as proof that the idea has merit. To steal a great analogy I read here, that’s like pointing to a comic book as proof of Superman’s existence.

Secondly, social scientists (or any people who work with facts) don’t just draw up a chart or graph because they like it or want it. A graph is supposed to start with real-world data and display it in a more understandable way. This so-called graph has nothing behind it except for fantasy, but ‘Rational Male’ is treating his made-up chart like it represents something in reality, instead of trying to prove it by testing. That is a perversion of the scientific process and should not be accepted by anyone.

Thirdly, while there are some parts of his idea that have a basis in reality, that does not *prove* anything. Believable lies have to have some basis in fact, or else people will see through them. You have accepted the reasonable bits and from that started to think the junk in the middle might be real, when in fact that is the lie he is trying to sell. Don’t fall for it.

Finally, the garbage on Manboobz and junk sites like that will hurt your chances of making friends and having close relationships. My son is on the autistic spectrum- I know how hard he tries to search for explanations of life and social interactions, because those are so difficult for him. We (his parents) often have to explain to him that the easy explanations he finds online are so often wrong. People are complicated- don’t be afraid to ask your friends for help in understanding them, in understanding what you read (like this blog post), and in general. Those discussions will more likely grow your friendships more than anything you find in fake graphs. Best regards.

It has been a long time since I was 15, but I can remember enough of what I was like then to be absolutely sure I did not find 38 year old men more attractive than 15 year old boys. In fact, I was usually creeped out by the attentions of men who were more than a few years older than me. And if this chart is right, the Justin Bieber phenomenon should not exist.

For instance, the specific gravity (SG) of a substance is defined as the density of that substance divided by the density of pure water. So the SG of water is 1, and the SG of silicates ranges from about 3.5-4.3 (silicates being denser than water).

I didn’t know those numbers (though I could have looked them up if I were curious). If I were drawing a chart making exact comparisons such data is invaluable. However I can draw a chart just fine showing an upward curve with nitrogen at the bottom, then water, then silicates, then gold, then plutonium, and label the y-axis “heaviness”. My exact placements are probably going to be way off but I can at least get the sense of what’s heavier than another thing right.

What I’m saying is that you’re trying to read a cheezy layperson chart scientifically so of course it doesn’t make any more sense than my chart would. It’s not scientific. But I don’t need exact units to convey a relative scale.

A couple of years ago I found myself watching “Karate Kid” for the first time in 20-some years. Back in the day, I was ALL ABOUT Daniel-san. The second time around, I was like, Heeeeeyyy Mr. Miyagi! What a silver fox!

I don’t think anyone takes issue with the general observations that:
1) You can make broad generalizations about who society considers attractive;
2) Among those general trends are that our culture tends to value women based on youth and beauty, while it tends to value men more for accomplishments, wealth, etc.

In fact, that second point is something feminists have written a lot about.

PZ can speak for himself as to what he meant by his OP, but what I consider mockable about the linked post and graph are:

a) It’s not useful. It’s not like the graph is some elegantly simple way of illustrating a complicated concept. If anything, it’s the opposite: the concepts are pretty basic and commonly understood, while the graph is just a mess.
b) It’s misleading. It’s an attempt to pretend that there’s some rigorous evidentiary basis for what’s being shown. Not just the use of numerical units, but the odd little bends and twitches in the curve suggest that this isn’t just some stylized thing for illustrative purpose, but actual science, which it ain’t.

And given (a) and (b), then what’s the point? What useful information or point am I supposed to draw from this?

There are situations where you can learn something useful from using some crude quantitative measures of attractiveness. For example, OKCupid has a blog that crunches some interesting data about what factors in an online profile affect response rates; for that kind of analysis, you might sometimes need to put a numerical value on physical attractiveness. (Though, as I recall, one piece of online dating research found that you miss a lot if you don’t account for variance in perceptions of attractiveness: someone who everyone thinks is a “7 out of 10″ draws less interest than someone who half the population thinks is a “4” and the other half thinks is a “10.”)

But this graph isn’t based on any actual data, doesn’t have any explanatory power, and doesn’t really have a point other than “hey ladies, you’re getting less attractive, while I’m getting more!” It would be like drawing some weird-looking graph showing that CTAP (Canine Trick Acquisition Propensity), measured in some made-up units and not based on any actual data, is inversely correlated with age, when your point is just that “folk wisdom says you can’t teach an old dog new tricks!” Garbage in, garbage out.

What I’m saying is that you’re trying to read a cheezy layperson chart scientifically so of course it doesn’t make any more sense than my chart would. It’s not scientific. But I don’t need exact units to convey a relative scale.

First of all, what other way would there be to read any sort of chart? “”Hey look, a chart, I think I’ll read it… but UNSCIENTIFICALLY!” Makes no sense.

Second of all, you do need units to ACCURATELY convey relative scale.

If you’re saying you just don’t care about accuracy then fine, but don’t expect others here to share your lack of concern.

MRA’s (or at least the ones who produced the chart) are personally attracted to women of about the age around the female peak in that chart, so they have the brilliant idea of convincing every woman around that age that their ‘value’ is about to drop, so they’d better start sleeping with a lot of men *now*, while they have the chance, and hope that at least some of them will pick the MRA’s in question?

Now, I see how you in your naivete may think that this is what MRAs think, but you’re completely wrong. Yes, they would like every woman to “know” that she has absolutely no value except as a sex object (or “self-warming fleshlight”, in the ‘sphere’s parlance) and will be worthless the morning of her 26 birthday. And they would like said women to have sex with them. But women who have sex are evil sluts, so by having sex those women would make themselves valueless except for “pumping and dumping”. So women must be young and attractive, and have rabid sex, but only with the particular MRA speaking at that moment, or else they’re completely worthless. Makes perfect sense now, right?

Forget how sciency this graph is or isn’t trying to be. You can take and dump the x and the y axis, curve, peak, whatever.
He is measuring* sexual market value. He’s weighing pieces of meat, trying to interpret how fuckable they are. That’s disgusting.

PZ and a lot of people here made a point out of the science fail that this graph is, but that’s mostly because a) we all know and agree that it’s message sucks so there’s no need to point it out and b) it’s funny (in a very sad way), how much the guy tries to veil his pathetic sexism** in sciency bits to make it seem legitimate

*you van even ignore that measuring=”pulling out of my ass”

*and that’s sexism aimed pretty much at everyone, even though women are victims of this kind of attitude much more often than men. It’s also obvious how much more “forgiving” he is of men’s “decline” with age than women’s

What I’m saying is that you’re trying to read a cheezy layperson chart scientifically so of course it doesn’t make any more sense than my chart would. It’s not scientific. But I don’t need exact units to convey a relative scale.

You what got me into science? Astronomy. Do you know how many diagrams of our solar system that I had access to were to scale? None.* Yet, they always manage to convey accurate information, usually within the text below the diagram, using the inaccurate scale to give us some semblance of our solar system’s structure. Those book referenced actual research and data, giving actual numbers and, as I got older, explained the techniques for measurement.

Your graph would at least approach that. Your graph would at least have actual data and measurement behind it. While it would be very inaccurate, it would at least convey the demonstrable truth that gold is denser than nitrogen.

That graph, right up there? Does none of that. It’s nothing more than made up numbers, placed in a pattern the author already believed existed. It shows nothing more than the author own biases. Evaluated on those merits, this graph is the best thing ever. It neatly reinforces the biases of some swaths of our culture. But evaluated on whether or not this graph communicates any sort of useful, true information? It’s worthless.

*we made one as a school project that was about right (with a large margin of error) in terms of planetary size, but the interplanetary distances were way off.

I have no idea wtf that peak span thing is supposed to represent. Probably some stupid misogynist bs.

where do members of the GLBTQ community tie into this?

Given who produced the chart, it probably doesn’t, and my knowledge of that community is insufficient to make a judgment. As a person who is bi but prefers women, I generally find older men sexier than older women, but obviously I don’t constitute a trend.

The fact that Aristotle married his first wife when he was about 37, and his second when she was about 18, has nothing to do with this of course! Or that marriage was traditionally an arranged affair in fourth-century Athens, with teenage girls generally marrying older men as soon as they reached reproductive maturity. No personal or cultural bias here, just pure unadulterated science!</blockquote. Good point, different cultures have drastically different perceptions. As a guy in 21st century America I can say that it's a close enough representation, but it's definitely not representative of the whole of the human condition.

I think by “circularity” PZ means that this ‘Rational Male’ person had a pre-conceived notion, drew up a picture to represent that idea, then pointed to the graph as proof that the idea has merit.

If so that’s pretty damn stupid. Read: unsurprising.

People are complicated- don’t be afraid to ask your friends for help in understanding them, in understanding what you read (like this blog post), and in general.

Thanks =) I do actually ask for clarifications when I don’t understand things, but usually I do not receive useful answers. For instance, when rejected I asked what wasn’t good enough, what I could do to be better, etc; this was always met with “eh, don’t worry about it”, or “I just don’t think it will work” or variations like that. I’m not sure whether the people themselves don’t know, if they’ve simply judged it socially unacceptable to point out my flaws. Point being that in my experience, directly asking for explanations of social phenomena rarely yields useful answers, either from my neurotypical friends or my autistic friends. Most of what I’ve determined is therefore from observation, though admittedly flawed.

a) It’s not useful. It’s not like the graph is some elegantly simple way of illustrating a complicated concept. If anything, it’s the opposite: the concepts are pretty basic and commonly understood, while the graph is just a mess. b) It’s misleading. It’s an attempt to pretend that there’s some rigorous evidentiary basis for what’s being shown. Not just the use of numerical units, but the odd little bends and twitches in the curve suggest that this isn’t just some stylized thing for illustrative purpose, but actual science, which it ain’t.

Ah, I see. So it’s illustrating a concept that is so universally understood that it doesn’t need illustrating, and dooing so is posturing for the sake of looking like a social scientific genious for coughing up an unscientific chart that everybody knows anyway? I had not considered it that way. My apologies for this, my reaction was that it was interesting to put what I’d observed in an actual visual form and had not considered the other implications.

This is irrelevant but I just have to say, your story is almost identical to mine.I never got to make a model solar system but I did get to make a model cell. Got a big salad bowl and some fruits and things shaped like organelles, filled it with acrylic and catalyst and raced to get everything into place before it hardened. It was a 20 pound beast of a cell but it was so cool.

But back to the graph, eh…I don’t have anything to argue with you over, really. My sense, from my 25 years of observation, is that the graph is roughly accurate. Accurate to my sample, anyway. I’m sure your community is different from mine, so even if we’re in a similar geographic location the graph may be alien to you. All that I can really say is that it isn’t alien to me. Even if it only confirms what I’ve already observed about my community. I guess I don’t really have anything else to say.

So it’s illustrating a concept that is so universally understood that it doesn’t need illustrating, and dooing so is posturing for the sake of looking like a social scientific genious for coughing up an unscientific chart that everybody knows anyway?

Well, let’s be careful about this. It’s universally understood if by “understood” you mean that people comprehend the argument, not that they necessarily agree with it. As PZ’s post and various comments in this thread show, there are a lot of problems with efforts to reduce attractiveness to a single dimension, pretend that all people of the same age are the same, pretend that all people share the same criteria or views of attractiveness, etc. But yes, if you back off the hyperspecific claims and make them broad generalizations, sure, I expect there will be broad agreement that “in general, our culture tends to value women for their beauty, and in general, our culture considers younger women more beautiful, so there’s a vague tendency for younger women to be seen as more attractive on average….” but you really do need those qualifiers in there if you’re not going to be misleading.

And again, what’s the usefulness of preparing a graph that purports to illustrate this? To use a different example, it’s generally true that women are more likely to vote for Democrats than men, and it’s generally true that younger people are more likely to vote for Democrats than older people… but so what? The tendencies are so broad and general that you can’t reliably predict how any given person will vote just because she’s a 23-year-old woman. And if you were running a campaign or other political operation, you’d want much more detailed and specific data to use as a basis for messaging, strategy, advertisements, get-out-the-vote operations, etc. I suppose you could use those broad trends to write some political analysis piece, but even then, drawing some made-up graph wouldn’t assist the reader.

rpjohnston,
The basic problem with the chart is that it doesn’t represent reality at all. Ultimately, people find attractive what they find attractive. Conventional beauty is mainly of use for selling beer and other consumer goods to doodz who are too damned insecure to admit to themselves and others what really appeals to them.

In many cases, one winds up attracted to one’s partner even if he/she has never been “your type”. And luckily for me, a woman is far more likely to care whether you can make her laugh than whether you have rockhard abs.

There is a corrolary to rule 34–for the vast majority of humans, there is someone out there who will find you inexplicably attractive.

This chart is just the sort of shit doodz pull to impress other doodz with their “worldliness and savoir faire”.

RPJohnston, it’s worse than that; it’s deliberately reinforcing the harmful lies we were taught about sexual worth, from “you must use this makeup to look older” when you are 15 to “you must use this cream to look younger” when you are 40. I am a wrinkle-free 47-year-old woman, by the way, who still gets smutty looks from men, and I was able to buy drinks (and get smutty looks from men) when I was 16, and I STILL got hooked by that dumbass chart for a minute. It’s one percent truth and 99 percent bullshit.

Also, from one Johnston to another, nunquam non paratus. Or, in this case, be aware that shit shovelers exist and that they shovel shit at you.

Got a big salad bowl and some fruits and things shaped like organelles, filled it with acrylic and catalyst and raced to get everything into place before it hardened. It was a 20 pound beast of a cell but it was so cool.

Oooh, that’s way cooler than my model cell. I just had some stuff in a round box full of cotton.

My sense, from my 25 years of observation, is that the graph is roughly accurate. Accurate to my sample, anyway. I’m sure your community is different from mine, so even if we’re in a similar geographic location the graph may be alien to you. All that I can really say is that it isn’t alien to me.

I’m sure the graph is accurate for some groups; to argue that it’s valid for the entire market (however the fuck that’s defined) is ridiculous.

The basic problem with the chart is that it doesn’t represent reality at all. Ultimately, people find attractive what they find attractive. Conventional beauty is mainly of use for selling beer and other consumer goods to doodz who are too damned insecure to admit to themselves and others what really appeals to them.

All true, except that I believe the basic basic problem of this chart is trying to associate sexual attractiveness with value in the first place, and I don’t think rpjohnston is getting that.

I don’t know how “sexual market value” is defined by that culture, or if they even have a definition. I’m working on my own interpretation of it: basically, the average relative value of a given gender at a given age to “the population at large”.

You can’t just say the word “value” without giving it some kind of definition. Let’s see if we can come up with one:

Let’s select a random population of heterosexual women and gay men and ask them: “Suppose that you’re not currently in a relationship, and you have a choice of going on a blind date with one of two men. All you know about them is that one is 30 years old, and the other is 38. Which one do you pick?” According to the chart, there will be an overwhelming preference for the 38-year-old. But if we change the ages to 23 and 50, then both choices will be equally popular.

Right away we can see that the chart doesn’t match established reality. Is a 38-year-old man really all that much more desirable than a 30-year-old? If you actually did the survey, I think the curves would be a lot flatter.

And for the 23-or-50 case, does it really make sense to say that they’re equally popular? If you looked at the individual surveys, you’d expect that the younger people would overwhelmingly prefer the 23-year-old, and the older people would overwhelmingly prefer the 50-year-old. They might look equally popular if you took the average across both groups, but by just blindly taking the average you’re throwing out a lot of meaningful information.

Even so, I’ve been told I’m more desirable (by several friends) than that old guy (though still not at all desirable).

My sense, from my 25 years of observation, is that the graph is roughly accurate

That says more about yourself than about anyone else, really.
Mind explaining in what units the values are? Maybe we are missing something that makes the graph make actual sense and not seem made up entirely from someone’s 25 years of observation. Never-mind the implication that these guys, possibly in their 30s, somehow feel more attraction to 15 years olds than to 35 years olds.

The pink curve more or less matches peak fertility for females. The blue curve doesn’t quite match peak earnings for males (it doesn’t drop that fast until retirement), but would be a decent approximation for younger years. Note also the weird corner the blue curve takes when we would expect men to be getting their first full time jobs.

Nope, all this is saying is that women are valued for their ability to have children and men are valued for their ability to be providers. In short it’s a graph of the author’s preconceived (and mercenary) notions of how people pick their mates. So zenlike @ 7, if you’re still reading this, there’s your reason for why the graph is odd in that particular area.

Our culture seems to be really screwed up, I do not find 18 year old women attractive anymore, I did when I was about that age though just as when I was 25 I found women who were around 22-28 very appealing Now I’m 42 and I find myself looking at women who are between 39 and 45 and thinking to myself “wow, she is really attractive”. I always assumed as everyone grew older their tastes grew with them. I find it disturbing to realize this is not how it works.

And for the 23-or-50 case, does it really make sense to say that they’re equally popular? If you looked at the individual surveys, you’d expect that the younger people would overwhelmingly prefer the 23-year-old, and the older people would overwhelmingly prefer the 50-year-old.

It’s only one data point, but my experience of being a guy of around fifty is that it’s a magical cloak which makes me invisible to women in their twenties (I’m ok with that).

yes there are cultural stereotypes about attractiveness relative to age, and there is a “market value” of that attractiveness (but NOT the market value that VD is talking about) – I am referring to the advertising and entertainment industries. “Sex sells” and if we generated graphs of annual income of actors, actresses, newscasters, models, singers, etc. (corrected for inflation) vs. age (one for male and one for female) I suspect we’d see a similar disparity of earnings relative to age/gender. Female entertainment professionals peak at an earlier age and have shorter spans of high earnings than males. Males would make more, longer.

VD (I suspect) is making a value judgment about men vs. women. My example would illustrate differences in how society values men’s vs. women’s images in the media

Can anyone explain to me in simple English the meaning of “trope” as used on this blog, frequently in plural.

It’s a device, usually literary, used to denote a standard, well-worn convention, such as the hero in a sword & sorcery fantasy always gets the girl, blah blah blah. Some helpful stuff:

From Wikipedia
This article is about the literary figure. For other uses, see Trope (disambiguation).

A literary trope is a common pattern, theme, motif in literature, or a figure of speech in which words are used in a sense different from their literal meaning. The term trope derives from the τρόπος – tropos “turn, direction, way”, related to the root of the verb τρέπειν (trepein), “to turn, to direct, to alter, to change”.[1]

Rhetoricians have closely analyzed the bewildering array of “turns and twists” used in poetry and literature and have provided an extensive list of very precise labels for these poetic devices. Some examples include:

Can anyone explain to me in simple English the meaning of “trope” as used on this blog, frequently in plural. My dicitonary/web searches were not helpful. Thank you.

There is an entire website devoted to tropes.http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HomePage
According to their definition;
Tropes are devices and conventions that a writer can reasonably rely on as being present in the audience members’ minds and expectations.

I’m not clear on what SMV is, even after reading some of that garbage. Is it physical attractiveness, or desirability based on a whole host of characteristics (attractiveness, wealth, personaility) or something else again?

[b]Beatrice[/b]

He is measuring* sexual market value. He’s weighing pieces of meat, trying to interpret how fuckable they are. That’s disgusting.

Are you saying that you think finding some people more or less physically attractive than others is disgusting?

Are you saying that you think finding some people more or less physically attractive than others is disgusting?

No, that’s not what Beatrice was saying, and I’d think that was pretty damn obvious. If you’re spending your time marking a whole group of people according to your notion of their sexual value, it’s fair to say you aren’t terribly interested in those persons as people.

You really want to know?
Don’t click this link unless you’re serious about really wanting to understand more about the concept.
I am going to post this link and then run upstairs to take a hot shower. Don’t click it unless you too are in a position to strip and scrub down real soon.
OK? you have been warned.
[wait, let me get the hot water running…]

What objective measurements are you comparing it against to determine its accuracy?

No objective measurement. Which is a point that I’ve stated; it’s not a chart built of hard data. Nor am I going to argue that it’s useful – it’s been explained to me that it’s not.

Subjectively, I personally find women late teens-mid twenties most attractive, and the sense that I get from my peers is the same. Ofc we’re all mid-twenties ourselves. My range of attraction to men goes to somewhat older. Of course there are outliers – Pauly Perrette, who plays Abby on NCIS, is hot imo, and she’s 44. But I can look at the graph and say eh, all things being equal my tastes tend to fall roughly like that, and from what i can tell my peers seem to think so too.

I originally also tried to claim that yall were looking at it too scientifically, looking for Data the way you would dissect a diagram in a peer-reviewed study, and that yall were missing the forest for the trees. I still kind of get that feeling, but I understand now the more important point that the whole thing is a green-and-brown painting that kind of looks like a forest for the sake of making it seem that there ARE trees. To beat the dead mixed analogy, I still think it kinda looks like a forest from my perspective, but there aren’t any trees and a blobby painting isn’t useful.

I am aware of the definitions and examples for tropes. This termwas used so often recently that I couldn’t help but to suspect that there is an alternative meaning. Especially since the damsel in distress topics that were in focus a few months ago. I failed to see the actual trope there. Maybe it would be easier for me if people would say e.g. “hyperbole” instead of the general “trope” but I also have language issues in general, not just in English.

So, yes. If trope means just trope and my handicaps disable me from getting the point everything is fine. All I needed to know is that there is no other meaning to the word I am not aware of.

Especially since the damsel in distress topics that were in focus a few months ago. I failed to see the actual trope there.

The ‘damsel in distress’ is a very, very old trope. So common, so used, so overused, that it’s expected. It’s re-used and “reinvented” all the time, in every type of media. It’s rarely the ‘gentleman in distress’, eh? Even on the odd occasion where it might be reinvented in such a manner, it’s still the ‘damsel in distress’ trope. Perhaps it would help if you substituted convention for trope.

Subjectively, I personally find women late teens-mid twenties most attractive, and the sense that I get from my peers is the same.

Fun trivia time.

If you poll people on what kind of coffee they like you will get answers heavily swayed to “rich complex dark blend”

However, if you then try to match that to purchasing habits you’ll find people don’t buy that. They buy lighter, sweater blends.

Because dark rich blends are culturally associated with sophistication and coffee appriciation. People aren’t even necessarially lying abou it, they honestly do not know their own preference. This is a known phenomina and a bane of focus groups and product testing.

Or to give a more relevent example. Research looking into what sort of porn people use shows a far greater preference for heavier women than indicated by self addmission of preference.

Before I dash off to get the brain-bleach, I will comment that there’s an interesting conflict between “fecundity as market value” and “women only have children to enslave men economically”. Shouldn’t there be an inverse relationship between the ability to bear children and SMV? I mean, those 25-year old women are just going to be taking your paychecks for life after they dumpster dive for your sperm.

I think they’ve failed to do a proper market assessment, by their standards.

Also, I think I hate you for making me read even part of that. Yes, you forced me! IT WAS A LINK! I can’t not click links!

Long story short, you pulled this shit out of your ass, based on stereotypes and your personal bias, and then presented it with no qualifications whatsoever, dressed up in authoritative-looking language in an attempt to make it look serious.

Then, when people rightly point out that it makes no sense whatsoever, you start faux-backpedalling (saying your chart is unscientific does not deflect criticism when you then go on to defend it in the same fucking sentence, you idiot).

Futrelle may think he is sharing some deep insight about standards of beauty in our culture, but all he is doing is reinforcing a host of harmful cultural stereotypes about women.
In the future I hope he will use a toilet next time he has to shit somewhere.

Futrelle may think he is sharing some deep insight about standards of beauty in our culture, but all he is doing is reinforcing a host of harmful cultural stereotypes about women.

Correction: Dave Futrelle is against misogyny and the manosphere. He calls it out. ManBoobz is a blog that mocks misogyny, run by Futrelle. He’s exposing vile shit to the light of day, not inventing it himself. Let’s not paint him with the turds he so lovingly draws our attention to.

Booshdouche, stop pretending civility. You just recommended a website that advocates for shooting girls for trying to go to school as well as rape and general misogyny. That graph no more represents the truth than you do. I second the suggestion that you get back under your rock with the other creepy crawlies.

It’s an uncomfortable truth because in accepting it you have to accept some deep differences in men and women that goes far beyond basic anatomy, and because for a large number of people reading this, they would have to accept that they are not at peak attractiveness.

Or, you know, it’s been rejected for the reasons given.

Aside: this would seem to imply that those accepting it are doing so because this graph places them at peak attractiveness.

And to ward off the comment complaints, I’ll just say that being attractive does not equal having worth…

This is blatantly contradicted by the factor this graph purports to present: sexual market value.

You’ve had sexual partners that you’ve abused. It might not be 100% accurate, but it’s generally right in the sense that you’ve had sexual partners. Since it’s generally right, might I say this about everyone everywhere at any point in history? Given that I’ll have been, oh, I dunno, let’s pull a figure out from the same source as the graph, 57% accurate with regard to the abuse (my own subjective research from watching people at the food court in the mall), then my general rightness allows me to say such things.

Looking at the weird shape of the blue part, I’m going to guess the creator originally made it when he was about 30, and the men’s SMV peaked at (completely coincidentally) 30 where it would have been shaped more like a bell. As he got older, and updated the graph, he noticed the SMV of men had it mystically shifted, (also coincidentally) matching his age.

It’s good to know that males under the age of fifteen have no SMV at all. That should make all the pedophiles evaporate.

What’s with the linear climb to age 23, and the sharp bend after that? I can’t make anything fit that, except maybe education levels.

I’m thinking the whole thing is just an attempt to show that the majority of women are past their prime, and therefore of lesser value, therefore all women are of lesser importance. Which is so very wrong.

I must say that the unusually specific shape of the male curve in this graph is rather reminiscent methodologically of how Ussher’s determination that the world was created on a Sunday at exactly 4:53pm….

Did you notice how I wrote “pieces of meat” instead of people? That was a clue right there.

To clarify:
There is a difference between saying what characteristics one finds attractive, and trying to proclaim that those tastes are somehow universal to everyone. That second thing isn’t disgusting, but it’s idiotic and shows that the person opining about everyone’s tastes is pretty narcissistic.

And then there is a world of difference between either of those two and assigning people a market value based on their attractiveness. It encompasses the idiocy mentioned above and adds a whole new disgusting level.

“it gives us a window into the weirdly repugnant world of the manosphere. But I assumed it was a snapshot of the worst of the manosphere…and to my horror, I have just realized that it was a representative snapshot. I now have this discombobulated picture of David Futrelle: he’s like a guy mining for turds under an outhouse. You simultaneously think, “OMG, that’s the easiest mission in the world” and “OMG, that’s the most horrible mission in the world.””

That’s why I don’t read it.

“I was led to this insight by Vox Day, of all people”

Wow I hate that guy. I have seen his stuff on FSTDT. What a di- wait I’m not supposed to say that. What an… unpleasant person.

“Yesterday’s foray into his hateful mindset led me to an awful discussion of a chart, and then…well, let’s just say I went spelunking beneath an outhouse, started climbing upwards, and suddenly found myself in the colon of the manosphere. I need a shower, badly.
Here’s the odious graph. All my scientific training is shrieking in outrage at this thing.”

That’s weird. What’s “SMV”?

“It comes from a site called The Rational Male — yes, the second word does not belong there. Here’s what the author says about it:”

I’m not going there.

“All that said, I can’t help but recognize the nerve that my SMV chart has struck throughout the internet. I’m not just talking about the manosphere proper here; from recognized psychology sites (generally for comparison) to BodyBuilding.com, this chart is easily the most linked-to picture from Rational Male. Whether it’s about refuting its accuracy or comparing how my instinctual understanding of SMP valuations gel with more scientific studies, that graph has become a benchmark, or at least the starting point, for a better understanding of comparative SMV over the course of a subjective lifetime.”

“It stands for “Sexual Market Value”. It purports to show the worth of men and women over a range of ages. Hold off on your rage for just a moment, and let’s look at it objectively.”

What does that even mean? Worth in terms of what? Also whatever it is, 15-year-old girls apparently have a good amount of it. Which is creepy.

“First, the SMV axis. What are the units? There aren’t any. Why? Because he doesn’t actually measure anything. Get that? All of the values in this chart are arbitrary inventions that he totally made up. The entire thing is a fiction.”

Seems to be the case

“Second, the whole concept of “Sexual Market Value”. What does that even mean?”

That’s what I asked.

“It’s dimensionless. He doesn’t have a way to look at any person and say, “Your market value is X”. It doesn’t even make sense to put this into a chart; my sexual appeal to my wife is huge, but negligible to everyone else.”

Hey I wouldn’t sell yourself so short, I’m sure there are quite a few people who think you’re attractive.

“Scarlett Johansen may have a reputation as a very sexy woman, but her sexual “market value” to me is zero, and not only is it offensive to propose that her sex is purchasable for some imaginary sum of a million quatloos or whatever, it probably isn’t even a real commodity.”

Probably isn’t?

“Except, and here’s the scientifically repugnant part, he has no way to assess the SMV of an individual, except to look them up on the chart. Which he made up. The circularity is so perfect, it’s practically Biblical.”

So the chart is based on nothing then.

“And then in his post he chastises critics for their inferior understanding of statistics, and unironically titles his post “Sex, Lies and Statistics”. Gaaaaah.”

How does he defend this?

“Let’s not even start on the ethics of judging people’s worth by the sole parameter of their sexual attractiveness. By that criterion, the author of that graph is a negative ten, and should be shoved in the hole beneath the outhouse and ignored for the rest of his days.”

“Don’t read the comments. In between totting up the scores on all the women they’ve had sex with, they’re laughing at the critics for not appreciating the science of the graph.
Hey, Dave Futrelle! I’m gonna let you handle this gig from here on out. I don’t think I have the stamina to handle it.”

Seriously, you have a choice here. Grow up and get hold of the fact that nobody owes you a relationship or the use of their body. Learn that women are not a prize that life dispenses when you have decided you’ve met some “good enough” standard. OR continue down the “poor me” rabbit hole to MRAsville and a life of bleating and whining about your ever so superior value. Your choice.

I’ve asked my wife. She’s had to go and change because she pissed herself laughing.

Also, as noted above, the SMV of a 15 year old girl is higher than that of a 31+ year old woman or an 18 to <31 year old man? Not in any universe I inhabit. Well, perhaps if you inhabit a universe where consent is somehow fucking optional.* I'm pretty fucking sure we don't live in that universe. I checked. All jokes I could make about this facile piece of shit "graph" aside, and there are a LOT, that is creepy as hell.

You know, I’d imagine that it might be possible to come up with some kind of scientific underpinnings to create a graph like this. I’m pretty sure that places like match.com have made some of their statistics about which profiles get how many hits, and you could look at some of those figures (also adjusting for hetero- and homo- sexuality, which our hero also conveniently ignores).

But why would you really want to? Even if it was based on real rather than made-up data, would an actual graph like that really do anything besides making older people depressed?

The reason MRAs don’t value women over 30 is that women over 30 generally aren’t satisfied with a douchbag sticking his dick into a cool oven, exploding after 30 seconds, and then playing with his smart phone the rest of the night.

@brucegee 1962 (#137) – not just older people. I know that I’m way better now, in my mid thirties than I ever was in my early 20s, because I’ve developed confidence and learned what I want from life, and what suits me. If you’d shown me that at 24 and said it’s all downhill from here, that would have have been pretty soul-destroying. I’ve seen so many other women say that their 30s, 40s and 50s were better than their 20s, so I don’t think I can be too much of an outlier.

And for people who were wondering why he flags up that 14 year gap between the different peaks, I think he might be saying that men deserve a partner 14 years younger than them, so that they reach their peak at the same point, but given that has some really unpleasant implications on the left hand side, I’m going to read it as hoping he means that after 30, once guys get more desirable than women of the same age (according to his graph), they should be trading in annually for a younger model until they get to the right age gap, based on the fact that he feels the need to point out the bit where the lines cross. Of course, I’m also sure I’ve read of younger MRAs complaining about too many women of their own age preferring older men (to younger MRAs, not unreasonably), so it seems like we can’t win!

I think i know why the guys who made up the blog are so keen to find 15 year old girls attractive: conversing with a kid (if any of them could manage an actual conversation) is definitely the closest they will ever get to looking intelligent and sophisticated. Even then it would have to be a particularly vapid 15 year old.

OkCupid has actually done some analysis of this, in one of their OkTrends posts. They looked at the age ranges people said they were interested in, and who they actually messaged. It basically boils down to:
1. Women tend to go for men around their own age, or a little older when they themselves are young. The range of ages they are interested in widens somewhat as they get older, but it’s generally somewhere around ten years either side.
2. Men focus on women younger than them (sometimes much younger), but their preferences also shift older as they age.
3. Older women are more confident, more interested in sex, and have healthier attitudes towards it.
4. Middle-aged men messaging hot 20-year-olds are delusional idiots who are almost certainly wasting their time.

I can actually see graphs like this being a vaguely useful tool in psychological and cultural research, given that what they are is expressions of personal preferences in partner-attractiveness, informed by cultural and idiosyncratic biases. Give someone the axes (okay, mark the y axis as “attractiveness”, rather than this toxic “SMV” nonsense) and ask them to draw what they think the graph should look like. You’ve learned nothing about the actual perceptions of society at large from this, but you have learned quite a bit about the perceptions of your test subject.

It could be quite a good test for self-absorption too – if the subject goes straight ahead and produces an “objective” run-down of “the truth” then it’s a fair bet they presume their preferences reflect those of society in general, whereas if they query the exercise with the administrator of the test, and need to be told “yes, fair enough, just do one based on your own preferences”, they’re more likely to be aware that diversity exists in this field. I think it would be quite interesting to test how prevalent the belief is that there are objective intrinsic standards to this. Sadly I would predict it’s rather common, but perhaps less common in countries with better education, healthcare, standards of living and less wealth disparity – the usual markers of social progress.

For myself, I have to say my age preference in men has stayed pretty much the same ever since I started having sexual feelings – when I was 15 I was attracted to 18-25 year old men, and now I’m 30 I’m still attracted to them. I’ve never found older men at all attractive sexually. But I like to think I have at least the minimal degree of social awareness needed to realise that this personal pattern is in no way universal. It surprises me greatly that there are so many people who lack this modest ability.

I have no problem with a 0-10 scale with no units (it’s easy to suppose the formula is something like [SMV]=10*[measured quantities] / [peak measured quantities] where the units cancel), but damned if I could find any detailed disclosure of how it was actually calculated. If it even was calculated, that is. In particular, I couldn’t find any real justification for the linear section, which immediately draws the eye. He mentions factors that may apply, but if a formula exists I haven’t seen it.

@PZ
I disagree with the criticism he used the “struck a nerve” trope that “every idiot trots out”. Lots of people who aren’t idiots ‘trot it out’, just as I’m sure many idiots don’t trot it out. I just see it as an observation that it has provoked an emotional or disagreeable response, which is a valid observation for anyone to make. Hardly worth pointing out. You didn’t explicitly say it was something indicative of an idiot, but it’s the impression I got.

captainkhan @132
In my fruitless search for a formula (or maths/statistics of any kind, really) I did find that SMP refers more generally to the sexual marketplace.

I disagree with the criticism he used the “struck a nerve” trope that “every idiot trots out”. Lots of people who aren’t idiots ‘trot it out’, just as I’m sure many idiots don’t trot it out. I just see it as an observation that it has provoked an emotional or disagreeable response, which is a valid observation for anyone to make. Hardly worth pointing out. You didn’t explicitly say it was something indicative of an idiot, but it’s the impression I got.

Not sure if serious or just trolling…

Provoking an emotional response is not, in itself, evidence of an argument’s value. I could probably get an emotional response by observing that your mother dresses you funny, but this would not be a triumphant point in my favour.

I read like 50% of the (rather large amount of) comments beforehand, so apologies if this is repeated.

@rpjohnston: I can come up with a graph the shows your contribution to this thread as literally worthless and everyone else’s counter-arguments as being 100%. This doesn’t show any science, however, it does agree with a certain worldview. I could write a blog post and post that graph as evidence, and then claim that the post is obviously right, after all, look at the graph. It does not make any of the graph or post -real- and it doesn’t mean that I’m right. I could even argue that the consensus that I hang around with is that you are 100% wrong. None of this is data. None of this is worthy of a shitty graph. None of this is right. You need to step back and think about how you may be interpreting this data to fit a pre-existing bias of yours. It’s very easy to say that women are only worth how good they look. It’s a lot harder to step back and say that a 50 year old woman who has no “marketable” sexual looks may be a lot better of a lover (in the whole sense of the word) than you could ever wish to be, and that that may be far more appealing to a good segment of the population than whether they are 15, with the fresh face (and brains) of a child and have big tits.

1) I work in the porn industry, where (like the fashion and cosmetics industries) we objectify people for a living. While there are not objective criteria for what constitutes “more attractive” vs. “less attractive”, the fact remains that yes, some people are more attractive than others. Understanding that subjective criteria are always present in any individual case, we also know that if ninety guys out of a hundred think a particular woman is more attractive than another particular woman, then we feel fairly confident in our model selection based on that response. Just like if you asked a woman whether or not a particular dude is “creepy”, and has no problem reeling off her rationalizations of that unfair, subjective assessment, there are entire industries who live or die on their ability to figure out this fairly-simple fact of human nature. “The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but that’s the way to bet.”

2) Vox Day’s diagram, with which you take issue, is based on this somewhat arbitrary scale. It is designed to show how youth and experience affect socio-sexual attractiveness in our culture. While you might rail against its implications, the fact is that it is a handy and pragmatic reference guide that fits better with reality than . . . well, pretty much anything you have come up with. If you have a better method of establishing such a metric, one that more accurate models real life experience, we’d love to see it. As it stands, this chart is not designed to, as you put it, “judge someone’s worth based solely on their sexual attractiveness”, but to provide a means for discussing the matter. As adherents to feminism, of course, both you and Dave Futrelle have a vested interest in denying the masculine interest of forming a cogent reproductive or mating strategy. Why you would work so blatantly against your own interests and those of your gender is your own business, but in the Manosphere we are in the business of advising men on the reality of the mating/dating/reproduction arena in this culture. If you have ANY useful information in this direction (and it appears that you do not), then publish it. Otherwise you are behaving as just another knee-jerk liberal trying to score points with his blog readership by bashing what neither of you understand.

3) There is no money involved in the Sexual Market Place. It is a model of human behavior, similar to many other models commonly used in sociology, psychology, and other “soft” sciences. While the concept of a analogous model to describe a difficult-to-measure phenomenon might confuse you, I assure you that it is used with regularity in many disciplines, and the wholesale condemnation of such things does not add to your credibility among academicians.

4) The blatant male self-loathing in your post demonstrates that you neither understand the Manosphere or your own masculinity. I’m not surprised or shocked — most people who take issue with the Manosphere do so out of willful ignorance, or only through the filter of those who oppose a robust masculine culture, such as Manboobz. While I understand this tends to be the philosophy of the few men left in the liberal camp, as a progressive myself I find the willingness of liberal men to publicly repudiate their own masculinity repugnant, disingenuous, and a stunning abrogation of independent thought.

5) Portraying the Manosphere as a tribe of angry white conservative men demonstrates you have done NO scholarship on the subject, and Futrelle’s obviously sycophantic attempt to curry favor with his feminist masters (gender-neutral term, natch) puts both of you on the same moral high ground as black Republicans, gay evangelical Christians, and married feminists.

There is a science, or at least rule-of-thumb engineering, involved with human mating and reproduction, believe it or not. Some of us have actually studied it. Some of us have field tested it. And some of us use this advice to help guys who have spent the last four decades being told by feminism how evil men are to finally find something within themselves worth valuing, and who in turn leverage this self-worth into a positive mating and reproductive strategy. Whereas the dudes who stick to feminsim’s “Be yourself, be a Nice Guy” end up chronically unlaid, in tragically bad relationships, or divorced.

And that’s the thing. Complain about us all you want . . . but how man liberal men do you know who are divorced? How many in unhappy “equal” relationships where “some spouses are more equal than others”? How many liberal guys have been brutally rejected, emotionally savaged and financially ruined because they believed the feminist ideology? All feminism has to offer them is “better luck next time.” In the Manosphere, we give you tools that you can use . . . tools that actually work.

And before you go all knee-jerky, I’m a happily married (22 years) father of three who gets laid more than you and Futrelle put together. I’m not ugly, I don’t live in my mother’s basement, and I love my extremely intelligent wife. When the rest of the liberal gents reading this decide they’ve had enough lonely nights or subsistence-level sex (and, believe it or not, sex is IMPORTANT to most men . . . no, really, I’ve seen the surveys) then they will eventually find themselves in the Manosphere, looking for answers. Because as everyone can see here, there are no answers on this topic available in the liberal sphere. If there were, I wouldn’t have to blog.

Not sure if serious or just trolling…
Provoking an emotional response is not, in itself, evidence of an argument’s value. I could probably get an emotional response by observing that your mother dresses you funny, but this would not be a triumphant point in my favour.

I didn’t say provoking an emotional response is evidence of an argument’s value. I’m not even sure how such an argument could be construed from what I wrote. I agree with your example that even though my mother dresses me excellently, your false observation may initiate hostile reaction from me. You could respond by saying that your statement struck a nerve. The idiom itself isn’t a trope trotted out by all idiots that say something stupid, any more than it’s a trope trotted out by all geniuses that say something hard for people to swallow.

@a_ray_in_dilbert_space
Beers over beers, yes. The units have to cancel, you see.

When the rest of the liberal gents reading this decide they’ve had enough lonely nights or subsistence-level sex (and, believe it or not, sex is IMPORTANT to most men . . . no, really, I’ve seen the surveys) then they will eventually find themselves in the Manosphere, looking for answers. Because as everyone can see here, there are no answers on this topic available in the liberal sphere.

Yet another douchecanoe has appeared to splain how he is an expert swordsman.

Did ya’ll know that if the menz don’t get enough sex, they apparently starve to death?
I fail to see a downside to this mythical issue.

Actually, I’m not entitled to sex. That’s a common liberal fallacy about the Manosphere. Indeed, I’ve earned the sex I get, thanks to my devotion to my wife and our happy marriage. I don’t need to be “entitled” to it — entitlement is a feminist conceit.

And sexual prowess has always been and always will be one measure in which men measure themselves against each other. It’s called “competition”, and has been a standard of masculine achievement since the dawn of time. Sexual prowess is one measure, but so is achievement and social status. If you want to refute that, I await your evidence.

And I didn’t make ANY assumptions about your gender. You might well have a XY chromosome. But by your statement . . . you ain’t a dude. You are rude, however, but that’s pretty much par for the course when discussing sexuality with liberals. Dave Futrelle hasn’t been able to have a discussion with a de facto man without rudeness to buoy his faltering charisma. It’s sad, but it is what it is.

ianironwood, The message I have gleaned from your comments is that females are chattel existing mostly so that YOU can abuse them. That abuse includes rape, and the attitude you are very effectively projecting is bigoted arrogance.

masculine interest of forming a cogent reproductive or mating strategy

Y’see I, being male an’ all, have always found the “strategy” of going out and meeting people to be quite effective. Of course I, not being a flaming arsehole, tend to think that just making new friends is a worthy goal in itself, and that if sex and/or romance occurs in the natural course of events, then this may be considered an extra nice thing. Not a bonus, just another nice thing that sometimes happens—when I treat people as people, rather than as potential orgasm-providers—along with good conversation, friendship and so forth.

You see sex as a commodity which must be earned? Can it also be sold and traded on, say, a Sexual Market with a certain Value? Hey, maybe you could sell futures in SMV. Buy the sexual rights of small children and sell them when they get old enough to have a high SMV.

If you have a better method of establishing such a metric, one that more accurate models real life experience, we’d love to see it.

Better method? There was no method in the first place. The values were pulled out of Rollo’s ass.

As adherents to feminism, of course, both you and Dave Futrelle have a vested interest in denying the masculine interest of forming a cogent reproductive or mating strategy.

Heh. Despite my “masculinity”, I have zero interest in reproduction.

While the concept of a analogous model to describe a difficult-to-measure phenomenon might confuse you, I assure you that it is used with regularity in many disciplines, and the wholesale condemnation of such things does not add to your credibility among academicians.

Are you serious trying to imply that this piece of garbage is, in any way, academic?

Emphasis mine:

The blatant male self-loathing in your post demonstrates that you neither understand the Manosphere or your own masculinity.

Ahahahahaha. Really, you aren’t the first to assert that. You won’t be the last, I’m sure.

Portraying the Manosphere as a tribe of angry white conservative men demonstrates you have done NO scholarship on the subject, and Futrelle’s obviously sycophantic attempt to curry favor with his feminist masters[1] (gender-neutral term, natch) puts both of you on the same moral high ground as black Republicans, gay evangelical Christians, and married feminists.[2]

1) The fuck? When did feminists adopt an explicit hierarchy?

2) The fuck? At what point did love, commitment and cooperation become anti-feminist values?

There is a science, or at least rule-of-thumb engineering[1], involved with human mating and reproduction, believe it or not.[2] Some of us have actually studied it. Some of us have field tested it.[3] And some of us use this advice to help guys who have spent the last four decades being told by feminism how evil men are[4] to finally find something within themselves worth valuing,[5] and who in turn leverage this self-worth into a positive mating and reproductive strategy. Whereas the dudes who stick to feminsim’s “Be yourself, be a Nice Guy” end up chronically unlaid, in tragically bad relationships, or divorced.[6]

1) Read: personal bias.

2) No, I have no problems with you thinking that your personal biases approaches the respectability of science.

3) You don’t bother to actually keep track of these “tests”, do you? No records of the failures? No controls? You know, all the things required to actually make this bullshit science?

4) Riiiiight. The one group telling men that they don’t need to adhere to the stupid and sometimes self-destructive role that society has decided for them are telling men they are evil.

5) Money, for those of you actually paying attention. That’s the reason men are valued at 35-40; older men have more money. The message here is that women are valued for sex, men for their money. This isn’t a good message for young men to here.

6) Really? Worked for me. Worked for most genuinely nice people, as far as I can tell. Sometimes mistakes and misjudgments happen, of course. Some relationships becomes abusive or damaging. But for the most part, self respect and respect for others will do you well. Of course, the latter part is key; women tend to know when you’re trying to manipulate them with niceness. It’s an old ploy and is easily seen through.

Complain about us all you want . . . but how man liberal men do you know who are divorced?

When the rest of the liberal gents reading this decide they’ve had enough lonely nights or subsistence-level sex (and, believe it or not, sex is IMPORTANT to most men . . . no, really, I’ve seen the surveys) then they will eventually find themselves in the Manosphere, looking for answers.

Based on PZ’s comments over the years, he seems to be rather happy with his sex life. As am I for that matter. So what’s your backup plan, since shaming us for not having sex isn’t gonna work?

Side note: the creator of this graph references the “1/2 + 7″ rule. You know, the one from xkcd? That’s the level of discourse, here.

And on what specific evidence do you base this gleaning? Because I don’t think I used the terms “chattel”, “abuse”, or “rape”. Indeed, Mrs. Ironwood and my daughter would take serious issue with that. In no way did I advocate anything of the sort. All I did, in fact, was point out that there is a SMP, that some people are more attractive than others, and that the intellectual dishonesty implicit in the post decries a lack of actual study or scholarship. How do you get “rape” out of that?!

I’m not a bigot . . . and if I’m arrogant, well, that’s because I’m good and I know it. I can’t help that. It’s a curse.

In fact, I love women. Not just sexually. That has NOTHING to do with my original comment, that the panty-twisting angst over the Manosphere evidenced in this post and the majority of the comments is essentially protracted name calling and ad hominem attacks . . . which pretty much everyone understands is a tacit admission of the lack a cogent response at the ready.

If you can prove that people aren’t more attractive than each other, or that people don’t decide their reproductive and mating strategies based in part or in whole on that fact, then I’d like to hear it. Otherwise, Meyer’s rant is just more Gamma name calling.

Again, anyone intelligent who can form a sentence without name calling?

Not A Monitor Note:
captainkhan @ 132, please read the existing comments before sharing your own stream-of-consciousness pearls o’ wisdom. This would save the rest of us from having to scroll through 3 screens of shit we’ve read multiple times already. thanks.

rogerfirth @#138: now that‘s a pearl of wisdom.

Ian Ironwood: you are repellent in every way, from your fedora’d avatar to your condescending attitude to your juvenile boasting, and your self-serving blog-and-book-pimping is noted and stupid. As for this:

And some of us use this advice to help guys who have spent the last four decades being told by feminism how evil men are to finally find something within themselves worth valuing, and who in turn leverage this self-worth into a positive mating and reproductive strategy.

I can only say that I feel genuinely sorry for your alleged three children, to say nothing of your alleged intelligent wife of 22 years. Did you know that interpersonal relationships can be approached as something other than a cynically calculated solipsistic “strategy”? It’s true!

captainkhan @ 132, please read the existing comments before sharing your own stream-of-consciousness pearls o’ wisdom. This would save the rest of us from having to scroll through 3 screens of shit we’ve read multiple times already. thanks.

@ DAZ 167: That’s the “mating strategy” that has led to half of the men who get married getting divorced. Which means you’re essentially relying on luck and fate to decide whether or not you mate and/or breed. While that is astoundingly brave of you, akin to buying a house based on a single picture you found on the internet, the wisdom of it is seriously questionable. The Manosphere has decided that the “shotgun approach” of being a Nice Guy and finding a woman who settles on you until a better deal comes along is . . . woefully inefficient and does not serve the best interests of men.

But that’s your prerogative. Just remember that next time you get beaten out for the attention of a woman you like by a guy with real Game. I’m sure it will be quite the consolation as they leave together and you go home alone.

And sexual prowess has always been and always will be one measure in which men measure themselves against each other.

I’m… intrigued by the practicalities of this. As far as I know, most men are neither gay nor exhibitionists, so how the fuck would they know how good some dude is in bed. Unless by “sexual prowess” you mean “having lots of sex”, in which case I feel sorry for your partner(s).

The Manosphere has decided that the “shotgun approach” of being a Nice Guy and finding a woman who settles on you until a better deal comes along is . . . woefully inefficient and does not serve the best interests of men.

Just remember that next time you get beaten out for the attention of a woman you like by a guy with real Game.

But that’s your prerogative. Just remember that next time you get beaten out for the attention of a woman you like by a guy with real Game. I’m sure it will be quite the consolation as they leave together and you go home alone.

Boo fuckin’ hoo. It’s not a competition. This game you’re in? I’m not fucking playing that game. I have never, in my life, “made a play.” If sex happens, then sex happens, but I don’t go looking for it. If I meet a woman who I find sexually attractive, I am perfectly happy to not end up having sex with her. Then or ever. And only a flaming arsehole would be jealous of another person because they’re having sex.

Y’see? The fact that you see it as a competition over potential mates is why you’re a flaming arsehole.

Oh, and show me evidence that any particular “mating strategy” correlates with later divorce. Then show me causation.

1) There is a method, and that chart is PART (but not all) of it. The method is called Game, and it works. That sucks for feminists, but it’s true.

2) Many men in the Manosphere have no interest in reproduction. That’s different than an interest in mating. Most men have an interest in mating.

3) “Piece of garbage” implies you have an understanding of the chart IN CONTEXT — is that the case? Really? Or are you taking the stand that a man finds a 25 year old woman and a 65 year old woman equally attractive? Just want to clarify.

4) I can see why you would say that.

5) 1983. Pay attention. And yes, 4th Wave feminism sees these as anti-feminist values. Those are the feminists who also decided that active discussions about eliminating men from the human race was a Good Idea. Yep, there’s more than a few feminists who want to see all men gone. No one in the Manosphere has made a similar statement about women. So . . . it ain’t just about equal pay, is it?

6) That “personal bias” is responsible for about $100 million in marketing decisions by my company, alone. And considering we use some pretty sophisticated marketing techniques to establish that “personal bias”, and hundreds of people’s jobs depend upon their accuracy, then we have to make darn sure that “personal bias” matches reality . . . or we lose our shirt, so to speak. And yes, we keep track. My company in particular has records of sexually-explicit buying patterns and mating behaviors going back to 1971. We run about 300 control groups a year, with each one getting from 2 to 5 tests in every major market. We have seven people employed just to deal with those statistics. And have you actually read what’s going on in feminism? Because yeah, there’s a lot of man-hate out there. And a lot spills over inadvertently into the main stream.

And the “women are valued for sex and men are valued for money” might not be a “good” message, but it does have the virtue of being HIGHLY ACCURATE AND EASILY PROVABLE.

So . . Nice Guys don’t get divorced? Women prefer them to Bad Boys? Is that what you are trying to say? Show me some stats. Your anecdotal “evidence” notwithstanding, if your wife is a self-declared feminist your chances of getting divorced eventually go up by about 2.5 times and your chances of entering into a “sexless marriage” (defined by the experts as less than 12 times a year) goes up by a factor of five. And those stats come right from a very, very expensive internal marketing report.

“… my sexual appeal to my wife is huge, but negligible to everyone else. Scarlett Johansen may have a reputation as a very sexy woman, but her sexual “market value” to me is zero….”

You obviously do not understand the concept of VALUE. The Empire State Building might also have “zero market value” to you while your house may be “priceless” to your wife … but we live on Earth, not in your ego-fictions, and human beings assign relative values to ALL THINGS, including sex appeal.

Certainly, you can keep deluding yourself with your private religion of idiosyncratic “sex appeal” values while keeping your head in the sand about the science of sexual attraction. Have you actually TESTED your BELIEF in your wife’s allegedly “huge” attraction to your “sexual appeal”? How HUGE is it compared, let’s say, with her sexual attraction to Brad Pitt? or Denzel Washington? LET’s WIRE UP HER VAGINA and actually FIND OUT!!

As far as Scarlett Johansen, it’s not just her “reputation,” you nerdy dunce! The U.S. may spend a TRILLION dollars to increase your reputation as a “sexy” man … and it will FAIL MISERABLY … for the all too obvious reasons that ONLY unattractive folks seem incapable of grokking.

To be sure, no matter what your wife TELLS YOU, no matter what you wish to believe, and no matter how INSULTING it may be to both of you to assess your SMV value … your SM value is what OTHER PEOPLE say it is, regardless of whether you or your wife have “decided” to retire from Darwinian sexual selection.

HOW DO I KNOW?

A heterosexual community can be analyzed as a marketplace in which men seek to ac-
quire sex from women by offering other resources in exchange. Societies will therefore
define gender roles as if women are sellers and men buyers of sex. Societies will en-
dow female sexuality, but not male sexuality, with value (as in virginity, fidelity, chas-
tity). The sexual activities of different couples are loosely interrelated by a market-
place, instead of being fully separate or private, and each couple’s decisions may be
influenced by market conditions. Economic principles suggest that the price of sex
will depend on supply and demand, competition among sellers, variations in product,
collusion among sellers, and other factors. Research findings show gender asymme-
tries (reflecting the complementary economic roles) in prostitution, courtship, infidel-
ity and divorce, female competition, the sexual revolution and changing norms, un-
equal status between partners, cultural suppression of female sexuality, abusive
relationships, rape, and sexual attitudes.

For the record, I provided my blog and book as a means of establishing my credibility from the Manosphere, not to pimp it. I don’t need to pimp it. It’s selling like hotcakes.

And, in general, yeah, I can say with complete confidence that I’d be happy to throw my masculinity up against Meyers any day of the week and twice on Sunday.

Oh, and being a male doesn’t imply being a dude. There are lots of poor, sad men out there who don’t make “dude-hood”. Mostly they just watch Dancing With The Stars in the friendzone with their girl-buddies.

Seeing as how the rhetoric here is, alas, pretty standard fare for a knee-jerk Manosphere piece, I’ll take my leave. I have more porn to watch and deadlines to catch.

But if you gentlemen have any skepticism over the idea that perhaps feminism doesn’t have your best interest in mind, I invite you to check out the Manosphere, and see what’s going on there. You might be surprised at what you find. Among the “misogyny” you’ll discover a whole world of men exploring all facets of masculinity and male issues. And you might challenge some assumptions you hold dear. It’s not for everyone, of course — but the bold and the ambitious among you will discover the truth. The rest of you will continue to think of us as knuckle-dragging neckbeards. That’s fine — that’s more or less what you’ve invested in — but if your tired of being the last dog in the pack, check us out. You have nothing to lose but your self-loathing.

There is a method, and that chart is PART (but not all) of it. The method is called Game, and it works. That sucks for feminists, but it’s true.

Protip: a name is not, in fact, a method. You shown no method for establishing a metric of sexual value; you’ve merely asserted that you had one.

“Piece of garbage” implies you have an understanding of the chart IN CONTEXT — is that the case?

Is there any context in which made up numbers are academic? Preeettty sure that the answer is no.

And the “women are valued for sex and men are valued for money” might not be a “good” message, but it does have the virtue of being HIGHLY ACCURATE AND EASILY PROVABLE.

Therein lies the problem with the manosphere: deliberate maintenance of a harmful status quo. You aren’t helping men; you’re tying them harder to the biggest systemic problem men face.

So . . Nice Guys don’t get divorced? Women prefer them to Bad Boys? Is that what you are trying to say? Show me some stats. Your anecdotal “evidence” notwithstanding, if your wife is a self-declared feminist your chances of getting divorced eventually go up by about 2.5 times and your chances of entering into a “sexless marriage” (defined by the experts as less than 12 times a year) goes up by a factor of five. And those stats come right from a very, very expensive internal marketing report.

See, we keep on coming back to the same problem: asserting specific numbers without any actual methodology or evidence (despite your demand that I show you some stats; if you look, I’m the only one who actually referenced real stats). Come back when you have either; it would break a long running trend among manosphere dolts.

A heterosexual community can be analyzed as a marketplace in which men seek to acquire sex from women by offering other resources in exchange.

Well, yes, it can, but you’re mostly going to get really stupid results if you do. Look, I’ll let you into a little secret: lots of women like sex. The vast majority, in fact. And lots of those women will seek sex. They don’t need to be bribed into it, they just need to feel that that sex is likely to be enjoyable and worthwhile. Normal guys who don’t treat the whole fucking world as some sort of competition can grasp this, and do in fact manage to have sex pretty regularly. And that sex is fun for both/all parties, because it’s based on people having sex with each other because that’s what they want to do, rather than as some sort of bizarre point-scoring mechanism.

But if you gentlemen have any skepticism over the idea that perhaps atheism doesn’t have your best interest in mind, I invite you to check out the Christosphere, and see what’s going on there. You might be surprised at what you find. Among the “bigotry” you’ll discover a whole world of Christians exploring all facets of theology and life issues. And you might challenge some assumptions you hold dear. It’s not for everyone, of course — but the bold and the ambitious among you will discover the truth. The rest of you will continue to think of us as Jesus-freaks. That’s fine — that’s more or less what you’ve invested in — but if your[sic] tired of fearing that you’ll go to Hell, check us out. You have nothing to lose but your self-loathing.

Sounds like every religious pitch from an evangelical I’ve ever heard online. Uncanny.

I provided my blog and book as a means of establishing my credibility from the Manosphere

HA HA HA HA HA HA HA

And, in general, yeah, I can say with complete confidence that I’d be happy to throw my masculinity up against Meyers any day of the week and twice on Sunday.

I don’t know who this “Meyers” is, but I’m sure he’d be happy to have a man-off any time, moderated of course by an impersonal manologist measured in internationally agreed-upon units of masculinity, Marquess of Queensbury rules. Wait, no, scratch that, that sounds kinda gay.

Among the “misogyny” you’ll discover a whole world of men exploring all facets of masculinity and male issues.

Therein lies the problem with the manosphere: deliberate maintenance of a harmful status quo. You aren’t helping men; you’re tying them harder to the biggest systemic problem men face.

Which is why I question his identification as “progressive”, he sounds like pretty much bog-standard libertarian to me, championing that libertarian utopia in which nearly everyone has to be constantly on guard against predatory assholes.

Oy, I read Bobby Aldesco’s link. It is full of ridiculous assumptions as you would expect when evo-psyche and economists collaborate.

Preconditions of market exchange
In general, men want sex more than women want sex
In general, men have resources women want
Women are free to make sexual decisions
The man and woman live in a culture in which information about others’ sexual activities is known or hinted
about, so that each person knows the current market price

It goes on to state that women who have high sex drives have lower market value, but men with high sex drives have higher market value.

So yeah, paper built on ridiculous false sexual stereotypes can be dismissed as complete and utter tripe.

So it appears clear from the numerous posts from Ironwood (seriously? He even has to advertise his insecurities in his name – that is sad) that he exploits women and other insecure men equally in his porn business so we should at least give him his equality bonafides. He embodies an exceptional study of pathetic cock-centric views of value that we can all learn from, kinda like “don’t eat the poison berries” because the results will be quite disgusting. His vomiting all over the thread is vividly descriptive of the PUA mindset providing an excellent picture of toxic masculinity.

“I invite you to check out the Manosphere, and see what’s going on there. You might be surprised at what you find. Among the “misogyny” you’ll discover a whole world of men exploring all facets of masculinity and male issues.”

“I have more porn to watch”

Well, he summed it up well enough.

I have genuine doubts as to Mr. Ironwood’s seriousness. The whole thing is so plausibly ridiculous, or ridiculously plausible, it comes off like a Daily Currant article.

I think there’s been too much work put into the whole “manosphere” for it to be a parody, unfortunately. I mean, I know, I can scarcely believe that he’d seriously use clip art of a fedora on the cover of that book, but Poe’s Law and all.

That’s the “mating strategy” that has led to half of the men who get married getting divorced. Which means you’re essentially relying on luck and fate to decide whether or not you mate and/or breed.

I didn’t have a conscious strategy. I met a lot of people and engaged with them as equals. I knew a woman I really liked as a person, we spent a lot of time together, it blossomed into love, and here we are.

You know, when you start with a solid foundation of respect and appreciation, that doesn’t change, and it makes for a fairly secure relationship.

Playing games and negging and maneuvering the other person into a relationship like you’d lead a horse into a stall? Not such a good foundation.

And sexual prowess has always been and always will be one measure in which men measure themselves against each other. It’s called “competition”, and has been a standard of masculine achievement since the dawn of time. Sexual prowess is one measure, but so is achievement and social status. If you want to refute that, I await your evidence.

I’m having wonderful images in my head of competitions where the bleachers are filled with happy hetero women, gay men, and bi folks, enthusiastically cheering on their champion fucker as he demonstrates his technique on a blow-up doll. THAT would be a competition of sexual prowess. Men bragging to each other about real or imagined sexual exploits? Not actually measuring their actual sexual prowess, just their ability to brag about it.

In fact, I love women.

Hahahahaha! No you don’t. You don’t know me. Don’t tell me you love me, just because (you assume) I have a vagina. That’s just creepy as fuck (yeah, I know, creepy is your modus operandi, but still).

That message has been poorly received. I seen many people hold him up as a fucking hero to look up to.

True, many dudebros do not understand satire. It is so satisfying to point out that their hero is IRL a happily married gay man with two children and watch the cognitive dissonance asplode their tiny little minds.

As adherents to feminism, of course, both you and Dave Futrelle have a vested interest in denying the masculine interest of forming a cogent reproductive or mating strategy. Why you would work so blatantly against your own interests and those of your gender is your own business, but in the Manosphere we are in the business of advising men on the reality of the mating/dating/reproduction arena in this culture. If you have ANY useful information in this direction (and it appears that you do not), then publish it. Otherwise you are behaving as just another knee-jerk liberal trying to score points with his blog readership by bashing what neither of you understand.

Here’s the lowdown, Ian. We don’t grok this whole “mating strategy” thing. We’re not mindless animals moving from one fuck to the next, and your dehumanizing talk only makes people like me roll their eyes. Unlike your usual audience, we aren’t bamboozled by the biotruthisms with which you couch your asshole ideology. I don’t need to be taught how to be a manipulative douchewad who treats relationships like commerce.

By the way, the Manosphere’s “strategy” seems to be far from sucessful, judging by the endless bleating of the dudes there complaining about all the women who “cheated” them on their “side of the contract”. By all means you look like economists – the Randroid kind, endlessly trying to shove the sphere of the real world in the square hole of your pet theories.

Oddly enough, for someone in porn it is very difficult to find photos of Mr. Ironwood on the internet. My guess is he does editing. Maybe he’s a foley artist (Does porn have those? If not why not? That’s an opportunity missed.) or a grip but he does not make the shex with ladies for a living.

However, he does call his home “Ironwood Manor” and describes his cat bringing him dead critters thusly,

Being both male and proud of his accomplishments, he sought to share and brag at the same time by presenting his hard-won prizes to his family.

That’s an excerpt from his blog entry in which he brags about his super sexxy ability to bury cat offerings titled (I shit you not): Alpha Move: Dispose Of A Body

He goes on to brag about how “alpha” and “game” it is to clean up after your cat and how women just can’t handle it.

I imagine if I invited my husband to “mate” or “breed” with me I’d get the same response as I got the night I encouraged him to “Do it for Grandma”*. That response was NOT a night of lovemaking. It was alot of stink eye and grumbling about lines that should not be crossed.

*She was starting to forget things and one thing she kept forgetting was that Hubster had gotten a vasectomy. She kept encouraging us to try to give her more grand babies. After a while we stopped reminding her and just promised to keep trying. I thought it was a funny joke. I have since learned that it was not.http://media3.giphy.com/media/5bo8XMq0GROw0/giphy.gif

vaiyt,
These guys seem awfully invested in the idea that women don’t want or enjoy sex as much as men. Do you think there is a nice way to tell them that their experiences are not representative of the norm?

These guys seem awfully invested in the idea that women don’t want or enjoy sex as much as men.

Anecdotal evidence and personal experience tell me that men who make this claim are men who are unable/unwilling to please women sexually. They can’t face the reality that it isn’t that women don’t like sex – they just don’t like sex with them.

I wonder if you folks ever realize how utterly joyless and repulsive you sound to absolutely anyone outside your narrow audience.

I’ve never had a conversation with an MRA or PUA in which they were able to accept that I was happy and secure, even when I was single. In fact, you can tell them that pointedly: you can grab their shoulders, hold their faces square to yours, and make them repeat the words “I am happy and secure” and they’ll ignore it and revert right back to script, like telemarketers terrified the call centre manager is listening in.

PUA: We’re playing Snakes and Ladders
Innocent Passerby: That’s nice, er, wait what?
PUA: We’re playing Snakes and Ladders!
IP: Uhm, no we’re not.
PUA: Yes we are. Everyone does.
IP: We’ll I might have once, years ago, but now I don’t enjoy it.
PUA: We’re playing Snakes and Ladders!
IP: Look that game is really immature, and frankly boring. I’ve no interest in playing it.
PUA: We’re playing Snakes and Ladders!
IP: Riiiight. I’m going to go now.
PUA: You losing, loser who loses!
IP: Look, I can’t lose at a game that I don’t play….
PUA: We’re playing Snakes and Ladders!
IP: [Backs away slowly, goes and finds an adult to talk to]

I see that PZ stripped out the link to assinine paper. If anyone wants to read more on the asshat who wrote it, there is a article on reclusive leftist discussing both the paper and further acts of gobsmacking asshattery.

Wait, did I dream that? Did Dudely McBigstick claim that he’s a longtime happily married man and father of three —

— who works in porn —

— and gets to have teh secks with all the pretty pron ladies —

— and he wrote a book in order to school all the sexually deprived Manosphere dudes about Game, which will lead to them being sexually fulfilled and super-manly, as he himself is for reals, because Science —

— and he totes doesn’t need to advertise his book because it’s flying off the shelves like hotcakes, if hotcakes flew off shelves

— and expect us to take him seriously?

— Oh, and did he then lecture PZ about evo psych!?

Pharyngula needs a new feature: Most unintentionally hilarious commenter since a lately.

While double checking to see if I’m wrong in that, I noticed a couple of inconsistencies among John Stiffdick’s diatribe:

Vox Day’s diagram…

That is not Vox Day’s work; it isn’t nearly repugnant enough. John Stiffdick seems to be defending this graph (as well as the argument behind it) reflexively, given that he’s unaware of the actual author.

There is no money involved in the Sexual Market Place.

Except a man’s sexual value is due to his money, by Stiffdick’s own admission.

Well, that was entertaining. Rusty Drawers turned up on Manboobz once, spouting much the same twaddle before he got his arse banned (for extreme tedium and making it All About Him, I think).

I wonder, if these PUA jackasses are soooo confident, such manly menz, why are they constantly having to brag and compete and so on? It’s a nice little homosocial setup they have, going on about what studs they are.

TW: PUA and rape
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Pity is, of course, it’s not just about that; it’s about hating women, and thinly-veiled talk about how to rape and get away with it. In some cases it’s not even thinly veiled; Roosh V and Roissy are admitted rapists (assuming their tales aren’t just of the “cool story, bro” type, which is just as likely). They even have advice on these blogs about making sure a woman doesn’t know your name, that she knows nothing about you, that you have a “safe house” to use solely for sex, so that afterward, she can’t find out anything about you. Why would any of this even cross someone’s mind unless they were out to commit rape?

For PUAs, just as for MRAs, MGTOW and so on, women are the things who cock-block men, who stand in the way of access to their orifices, and need to be browbeaten or tricked or assaulted (“kino”) into submission. We’re not people to them; not individual; we’re just passive things, vending machines that have to be coerced into giving the men what’s rightfully theirs.

That’s the truly repugnant thing about these men, even worse than their utterly joyless, dismal worldview, and, presumably, utterly joyless and dismal lives. Even if they never carry out their fantasies, it’s all too obvious they want to.

The Manosphere has decided that the “shotgun approach” of being a Nice Guy and finding a woman who settles on you until a better deal comes along is . . . woefully inefficient and does not serve the best interests of men.

Isn’t it telling that the Manosphere Dudes™ always project their own personal bad behaviour of abusing other people for their own personal on women as a whole?

“And yes, 4th Wave feminism sees these as anti-feminist values. Those are the feminists who also decided that active discussions about eliminating men from the human race was a Good Idea. Yep, there’s more than a few feminists who want to see all men gone. No one in the Manosphere has made a similar statement about women. So . . . it ain’t just about equal pay, is it?”

We aren’t in 4th wave feminism. Yes, you are a douche. Feminists only want to eliminate you from the human race but you’re doing such a good job of it already so we’re back to our wily ways. No, you don’t say get rid of women you just write nutjob books and rants online about how women are evil.

And sexual prowess has always been and always will be one measure in which men measure themselves against each other. It’s called “competition”, and has been a standard of masculine achievement since the dawn of time.

Incidentally, as I read these words, this example was open in another tab. Coincidence? Hardly.

(For the record, enough money will buy just about anything that is tangible. You can’t buy love but I guarentee Brad Pitt will blow you for a billion quadrillion dollars).

All the other foolishness was pretty well addressed, but the above seems like a comepletely ridiculous assertion that really needs to be disabused. You guarantee Brad Pitt would blow me for some large armount of money? Why? What could all the money in the world buy for Brad Pitt that isn’t already available to him?

See, it’s a stupid thing to say, but stupider when some wealthy, powerful person is the example. If anyone, they are the least likely to suck a dick for a dollar, which reduces you to a pointless argument that the needy or unfulfilled will do stuff for money. NO SHIT.

Stacy @249: Based on what he’s posted elsewhere, “works in the porn industry” means that he gets paid to write reviews of porn videos. This is like being a reviewer for a local newspaper and claim you “work in the film industry”. That is, it’s misleading, but hey! Maybe people won’t probe too closely and then they’ll think you’re more glamorous and on-the-ins than sitting and watching movies with laptop in hand. (One hand, anyway.)

He’s also ranted before about Men Going Their Own Way and how he wants to take his sons to some more enlightened country where they don’t have to worry about evil sperm-and-custody stealing females, which squares rather oddly with his claim to being a happily married family man. Of course being a happily married family man ALSO squares rather oddly with his advice and interest in PUA culture and “game”.

And sexual prowess has always been and always will be one measure in which men measure themselves against each other. It’s called “competition”, and has been a standard of masculine achievement since the dawn of time.

No shit, Sherlock. That’s the point: bragging about sexual prowess, penis size and other such measures are meant for insecure men to affirm themselves against other men. It might be surprising to realise women give little, if any, shits about bro pissing contests.

Chas:

yeah, he asserted that he got more sex than everybody else combined without specifying the lucky participants.

That would require him to acknowledge women as people instead of more numbers for the Vagina Count.

Based on what he’s posted elsewhere, “works in the porn industry” means that he gets paid to write reviews of porn videos. This is like being a reviewer for a local newspaper and claim you “work in the film industry”. That is, it’s misleading, but hey! Maybe people won’t probe too closely and then they’ll think you’re more glamorous and on-the-ins than sitting and watching movies with laptop in hand. (One hand, anyway.)

You are offering to repeatedly vomit up your testicles? Well that’s very thoughtful of you, but – rule 34 notwithstanding – I honestly don’t think anyone’s going to be interested.

I thought he was going to take of his mighty peen and hurl it around. Though since it’s about this mysterious Meyers person, it doesn’t matter much.

Has anyone found out who this Peez Meyers bloke is, btw? Is he a doppelganger for PZ Myers? Is he the ultimate hero, lurking on the internetz, fighting the forces of evil? Is he mild-mannered biologist at the Daily Freethoughtblogs, PZ Myers, searching for the last remaining phone booth in the USA to change to … MEYERSMAN?

I’m still waiting for a cogent argument, instead of name calling. Anyone intelligent out there?

That last comment is the icing on the turd.

You have no idea the sex lives of the people here. You presume that anyone who isn’t an asshole, “can’t get the chicks”. You also predicate your line of argument on the (provably) false idea that, “men need sex”, and cap it with the idea that engaging your facile (and more than a a trifle peurile) arguments as if they were of merit is required to show intellgence.

6) That “personal bias” is responsible for about $100 million in marketing decisions by my company, alone. And considering we use some pretty sophisticated marketing techniques to establish that “personal bias”, and hundreds of people’s jobs depend upon their accuracy, then we have to make darn sure that “personal bias” matches reality . . . or we lose our shirt, so to speak.

Makes me wonder if he might not have an interest in keeping a a large body of men sexually frustrated; and chasing after a small pool of women (who look like that, “objective standard” being argued for), so as to increase the market value of the product he sells.

Honestly, I thought that “manosphere” was a word PZ made up some time ago to make fun of the MRAs and PUAs. It was in the title of one of his posts way back that read like sarcasm. So they actually unironically use it?

Someday I’m going to use that as the title for a story in which mutant fowl hatchlings lie in wait under the outhouse seat and attack viciously with tiny garden trowels when somebody sits down.

But look, it’s hard to argue with a statement like ‘some women seem to enjoy the company of assholes’. I can’t think of any other explanation for the years of photos over at HCwDB (a site that I happen to know about but do not endorse).

@Chas
I don’t know how you can tell if someone’s an asshole based on a photo. Maybe men can tell when a guy’s an asshole just by looking at him. Or maybe they are projecting.

The assholes don’t start out as assholes. They know to act like the most wonderful, kind, sensitive, romantic human being that has ever walked the face of the earth. The only show their asshole side when they get the woman in a situation where she’s dependent on him. I’ve seen it happen all the time.
Then of course the “beta” males look at that and think, “That’s it! I must act like an asshole to get chicks,” totally ignoring the Mr. Sensitive act and love-bombing that led initially led the woman into the relationship, and the Stockholm-syndrome and denial that keeps her there.

I don’t know how you can tell if someone’s an asshole based on a photo.

of course you can’t all the time, but have you looked at any of those photos? There’s a bro-uniform and set of behaviors that just advertise assholitude. My opinion, of course.

Or maybe they are projecting.

subtle! But no, I do not belong to the class of assholes I’m talking about.

The assholes don’t start out as assholes. They know to act like the most wonderful, kind, sensitive, romantic human being that has ever walked the face of the earth. The only show their asshole side when they get the woman in a situation where she’s dependent on him. I’ve seen it happen all the time.

I would not deny that your scenario is common, but it’s by no means universal. Some guys are just assholes, period, from the get-go, and yet many of them have wives and/or girlfriends regardless. This seems to me empirical and uncontroversial.